Dedicated fonts

This is a small study into the advantages of dedicated bold and italic fonts in modern browsers.

Faux bold vs dedicated bold fonts

Dedicated bold fonts provide weightier letter forms that are shaped for the purpose.

The alternative is faux or false bold applied by the browser, with varying
implementations. It follows that an advantage in a dedicated bold font is greater consistency across platforms and browsers,
something that many site designers strive for.

Anywhere faux bold is applied in the most widely used browsers, the weight of the type is exaggerated through false-bolding
techniques to arrive at an equivalent to 700 weight, at least at the time of writing (indicated by the related
CSS specification.).

A note on the use of @font-face

Remember to set a font-weight and font-style within any @font-face declaration defining a dedicated font weight or style. This is important
both to prevent additional false-bolding and to allow the use of a font-weight propery on the appropriate
CSS selector (that property would then be applied to any font fallen back shuold the web font be unavilable for any reason).